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Assessment of Lincoln County Canvassing Efforts 2018 Mid-Term

The LCDCC would like to sincerely thank all the dedicated volunteers who took part in our “Get out the Vote” operation. By any standard, it was a great success. Congratulations!

Very early on in Trump’s first term, our local party embraced the slogan “Work for the Wave. On election night, there was some question about whether the “Blue Wave” would materialize. The dust has now settled. Most final results are in and the answer is clear: The Blue Wave was very real, and our efforts were part of a historic Democratic victory.

In Lincoln County we won every race and ballot initiative that we endorsed. The sole exception was the race for Mayor of Newport. These results were echoed across the state.

Nationwide, Democrats won back the House with a gain of about 39 seats. We flipped 7 statehouses and 7 governorships. Over 330 Democrats flipped offices at the state level across the nation. This was the biggest Democratic win since Watergate. A definite wave!

Nationwide, we outvoted the GOP by almost 9 million votes—a six million vote increase over our 2016 vote.

The GOP’s meager gains of 2 senate seats and their holding of some usually safe governorships hardly offset the magnitude of their defeat. Where there were recounts or GOP wins, they were in states where voter suppression and gerrymandering has defined their brand.

Just as Trump has failed to protect the security of our elections, in Florida, Tennessee, North Dakota, Georgia, Kansas, and Texas (all of which have had Republican governors for decades), there was widespread voter suppression and other election problems.

There is an important lesson here: Until Democrats can win control of, and fix the broken election systems in red states, the only remedy for GOP voter suppression is for Democrats to work even harder to turn out voters!

For our local party, our “Get out the Vote” efforts will have far reaching effects. We raised our local party profile, gained credibility with Oregon’s State Party leadership, with candidates, and with voters. We learned lessons that will help us immensely in our future efforts. All this will really matter as we move towards 2020. No one should have any illusions about this: as long as Trump is in office, and his GOP continues to suppress votes and degrade our Democracy, the struggle is not over!

In terms of final numbers statewide, voter turnout was at about 67.8%. Countywide, voter turnout was about 69.09%. Countywide Democratic turnout was significantly higher than the state or county averages at 81.7 %

Even our precinct with the lowest Dem turnout was higher (70.3) than the county average. In some counties we reached 88% turnout (almost 20% higher than the county average).

Half our precincts were above 82% (the median). The largest cluster (5 precincts) was at 84% (the mode). Overall, then, by every statistical standard, Democrats outperformed the county average by roughly 12-15 points.

Finally, everyone who helped work on our campaign should remember how many key races nationwide were decided by less than ONE percentage point.

Margins matter and your efforts mattered! Thank you again for your great work!

With our eyes on the prize and 2020 vision we look forward to a rising Blue Tide.

Prepared by Gilbert Schramm

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